In a long, informative, and sobering article, Richard Heinberg describes the difficulty of trying to “solve” climate change when it is intertwined with so many other equally complex and daunting problems...
The polycrisis is a confluence of climate change with rising inequality, resource depletion, pollution, and the disappearance of wild nature, among other worsening dilemmas.
We can’t know what to do about climate change unless we understand this big picture. Once we do, we see that many things we might do to “solve” climate change will have their own damaging impacts.
For example, building renewable energy infrastructure or carbon removal technology at scale will require an enormous increase in energy usage and resource extraction. Further, many of the needed resources are in ecologically sensitive areas, or countries with a history of labor exploitation and steep income inequality.
Also, all this resource extraction, energy usage, and manufacturing will produce its own pollution and environmental degradation. So, we might reduce carbon emissions, but we will just worsen other aspects of the polycrisis — which are also significant threats to our human future.
The polycrisis impacts our capacity for climate response. Political polarization, driven in part by increasing economic inequality, makes it harder for nations to make the tough choices required to reduce emissions. And the accelerating depletion of mineral resources threatens the build-out of alternative energy infrastructure.
Altogether, this bigger picture leads to the conclusion that there is no techno-fix. If we wish to avert the worst impacts of climate change, we will have to live differently.
